Mr Wigmore (right) was the communications director for Leave.EU campaign, which was endorsed by former Ukip leader Nigel Farage and funded by the millionaire businessman Arron Banks (left) (Photo: Andy Wigmore/Twitter)

A leading pro-Brexit campaigner has praised the “very clever” propaganda techniques of the Nazis, a tape recording of private comments has revealed.

“The propaganda machine of the Nazis, for instance – you take away all the hideous horror and that kind of stuff, it was very clever, the way they managed to do what they did”

Andy Wigmore

Andy Wigmore also acknowledged that the Leave.EU group deliberately deployed “outrageous” and “provocative” tactics borrowed from Donald Trump to keep immigration at the heart of the 2016 referendum campaign.

Trump’s techniques ‘copied’

“The only way we were going to make a noise was to follow the Trump doctrine, which was, the more outrageous we are, the more attention we’ll get, and the more attention we get, the more outrageous we’ll be. And that’s exactly what we did.”

But Mr Wigmore said that the release of the tape “sounds like another attempt to try and justify a committee that is desperate to try and find any excuse to undermine the referendum”.

He said his conversations with Dr Briant were not for publication and described their release as “willful deception and trickery”.

The Nazis came up for discussion “in a historical context” in reference to the scare tactics being used by the Remain campaign, said Mr Wigmore.

He repeated Leave.EU’s denial that it used Cambridge Analytica’s services.

‘Bogeymen’

The chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, Nigel Oakes, was also recorded saying Mr Trump “leveraged an artificial enemy” in the shape of the Muslims in the same way that Adolf Hitler played on pre-war German hatred for Jews.

Mr Collins said the Nazis’ tactic was “to create bogeymen for people to be frightened of” and that its inquiry wanted to determine “were these tactics being used in the referendum campaign”.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think people listening to this programme will be very frightened to think that people like Nigel Oakes and Andy Wigmore would have access to their data and could therefore target them in this way.”

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